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Bantam Press • Biography: historical
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1
A LIONESS AND HER CUBS
ONE THING YOU NOTICE IN MONGOLIA: THE WOMEN COMMAND attention. In the countryside, crones with walnut faces skewer you with direct, self-confident eyes; tough, redcheeked girls ride like master-horsemen. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital, you cannot walk from the main square to the department store (there is only one) without passing a beauty radiating elegance, and proud of it. They have a bearing, an assurance, that is more New York than Beijing. Not all, of course, because Mongolia has its share of poverty. But for centuries Mongolia's nomadic, herding traditions ensured that women matched their men in self-reliance. Even today, country women not only cook and mend and raise the children - they hunt and herd if they have to. One of Genghis Khan's decrees reflected an everyday reality: 'Women accompanying the troops carry out the work and duties of the men when these go to war.' They fought as well. In 1220, Genghis's daughter led the final assault on the Persian town of Nishapur, slaying 'all the survivors save only 400 persons who were selected for their craftsmanship'.1 In family life and in politics alike women have always been a force. Inheritance was through the male line, but widows - upper-class widows, that is - could take over their late husbands' estates, which made some of them rich, powerful and fiercely independent. It is a strange fact that the world's greatest land empire, the very image of masculine dominance, owed its existence and growth to extraordinary women.
As a child, young Genghis was a down-and-out, cared for by his widowed mother Hoelun, who was rejected by her clan and reduced to scrabbling on mountain flanks for juniper berries. It was Hoelun who showed him what it took to survive; how to rebuild family links, call upon traditional friendships, create new ones, forge alliances and reward loyalty, never seeking personal gain, always looking out for ordinary people and their families. If he went wrong, she would rant at him until he saw the error of his ways. When as a teenager he killed his own half-brother, thus ensuring that he would become the unchallenged head of the family, she gave him hell. The Mongols' foundation document, The Secret History of the Mongols, records her words in verse. 'You who have destroyed life!' she yells, and compares him to many sorts of animal in acts of viciousness and stupidity. How could he do such a thing when they had nothing going for them except their own unity as a family, at a time when-
We have no friend but our shadow,
We have no whip but our horse's tail?
Genghis learned his lesson, and was keen for others to learn it too, because it was surely he who, in his maturity, encouraged his bards to turn this story into song. As emperor, Genghis honoured - some say feared - his mother all her long life.
The wife Genghis gave to his son Tolui was another one in the same mould. Her name was Sorkaktani, and she is the focus of this chapter, because in 1215, although she could not have had an inkling of the fact, she held the future in her hands - and not just because of the new-born Kublai. Of her five children, two became emperors and a third ruled Persia. Had it not been for her ambition, foresight, good sense and a couple of interventions at crucial moments, Genghis's empire might have dissipated in family squabbles 20-odd years after it was created, and Kublai would never have come into his inheritance.
Sorkaktani was not even a Mongol. She was a Kerait; and her upbringing in this Turkish-speaking group that dominated central Mongolia when Genghis was born provided good training in the politics of Inner Asia. The Kerait king, Toghrul - 'falcon' in Turkish - was Sorkaktani's uncle. He was the alpha ruler among the many heads of the clans that grazed the grasslands beyond the Great Wall, with good contacts to the west and south. Toghrul's people had been converted to a form of Christianity by Nestorian missionaries, followers of the heretic Nestorius who had claimed that Christ was both God and man equally, two persons in one, not the single, indivisible Word-Made-Flesh of mainstream Christianity. But Toghrul also had relations with north China, in later life being awarded the title of prince (wang), becoming better known to historians as Wang Khan, 'Prince King'. He had been crucial in the fortunes of Genghis's father, who had come to Toghrul's aid on several occasions and become his 'sworn brother'. Under Genghis, the relationship had started well, but it went sour, and the two ended up fighting a war from which Genghis emerged as victor.
Toghrul had a younger brother, Jakha, whose story reflects the complexities and dangers of the shifting alliances among the steppe tribes of Inner Asia. Jakha had been raised among the Tangut people of Xi Xia, the Buddhist state of present-day Xinjiang, and rose among them to the rank of commander - gambu in Tangut, which became part of his name: Jakha Gambu. As a warlord with his own small army he returned to Mongolia, joining Genghis at a time when Mongols and Keraits were still friends - and, unlike Toghrul, remaining true to him when things went wrong between the Mongols and Keraits. In the decade-long inter-tribal war for national unity, Keraits fought on both sides. When the main body of Keraits was beaten in about 1200, Genghis forged the tribes together with marriages. Jakha had two daughters. The elder, Ibaqa, Genghis took as one of his own wives - quite an honour for her proud and loyal father - though he later handed her on to one of his generals. The younger one, Sorkaktani, he gave to his youngest son, the teenage Tolui, right at the start of his distinguished military career. Over the following years of a marriage punctuated by her husband's long absences on campaigns in China and Muslim lands she produced four sons, so gaining both a motive and a means to win friends and influence people.
Among them, her four boys would dominate much of Asia for 50 years, and redefine the course of its history. But she had a long wait for time's whirligig to spin in her favour.
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© Transworld Publishers |
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More Information
Publication Date: 03/04/2006 • 400 pages • Royal Octavo
• ISBN: 0593054482
Territory: World All Languages |
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